I'm trying to find ways to provide incentive for players to log on together, as our MUD suffers from a rotating door wherein there are several active players, but they're rarely on together. Much of this can't be helped for time zone or work hour reasons, but I think having a weekly event or gathering of sorts will help bring together the active players, and get people to log on more regularly.

My concern, however, is that I need some ideas for events that still work well for small player showings, who aren't big on roleplaying. An immortal hide-and-seek is much fun, but with only 1 or 2 players logged on, it's not fun at all.

What about areas that are only open certain real-life hours or days? And they could be part of some more complicated quests, or have rare (not necessarily powerful) items?

Would releasing new content on a weekly/bi-weekly schedule encourage people to log on in the day or two after it's released?

Does anyone else have weekly or regularly scheduled events? Does it bring the players together, or frustrate the ones who can't make it? Do you rotate the schedule to help more players make it?

I remember hearing of a mud which introduced a "happy hour", during which players earned additional exp. At first I thought it sounded like a cheap gimmick, but apparently it did manage to encourage players to log on at around the same time each day. It probably wouldn't encourage players to play more, though.

Having areas which are only accessable at certain times might also work, particularly if they contained something valuable. You'd have to make sure the area had replay value though.

Events such as festivals, contests, tournaments or invasions could also be fun. Something that can be padded out with mobs depending on how many players take part.

I used to play a MUD that held regularly scheduled events on a daily basis. These were kind of like specialty quests and would have any number of different pay-offs depending on the type of quest. Most of these things were chosen at random (or so it appeared) and quite often, the times that they would be held would not coincide with a lot of player's access schedule.

There was good work done to try and maintain a good balance between US and European times, so that players on both sides of the pond would get a chance to play in these special events, but once again, the timing was never perfect.

We'd all like to have playerbases of a few hundred players who somehow have nothing better to do than sit around connected all day, but sadly, such is not the case. KaVir's suggestion of using events where mobs could pad out and help the player when too few are connected is a good idea.

I think a large part of the problem is that MUDs were developed for cooperative or group playing, leaving little room for the solitary adventurer. This presents a problem if you have a bad tendency of being the only player connected when you get a chance to log in to your favorite MUD.

I'd suggest trying to find events that your players would enjoy playing by themselves, then find a way to make it multiplayer. That way, even if there's only one player on, you can have an event, but if there's many, then you can have many players playing in that same event, having fun alone or together.